DVDCompress

📖 Overview

DVDCompress is an open-source, self-hosted web application that transforms arbitrary modern video files (.mp4, .mkv, .avi, .mov, .ts, .webm, etc.) into 100% standard-compliant, standalone-playable DVD-Video (VIDEO_TS) and Blu-ray (BDMV) physical discs or ISO images.

Equipped with a real-time mathematical bitrate budget calculator, NVIDIA GPU decode/encode acceleration, automatic optical drive discovery, pause/resume queue management, and a modern responsive web interface, DVDCompress eliminates the complexity of optical authoring on home servers, Unraid, TrueNAS, and NAS systems.

✨ Features

• 🎞️ Universal Video Ingest: Accepts single videos or multi-episode season playlists in any container format, video codec (H.264, HEVC, AV1, VP9, MPEG-4), and audio codec (AC3, AAC, DTS, TrueHD, FLAC).
• 🧮 Dynamic Bitrate Budgeting Engine: Calculates optimal video and audio bitrates across $N$ inputs with precision filesystem overhead allocation (UDF/ISO 9660 + MPEG multiplexing factors) to guarantee disc fit without overflow:
  • DVD-5 (Single Layer): 4.30 GiB target budget (~4,300 MB)
  • DVD-9 (Dual Layer): 7.85 GiB target budget (~7,850 MB)
  • BD-25 (Single Layer Blu-ray): 23.00 GiB target budget (~23,000 MB)
  • BD-50 (Dual Layer Blu-ray): 46.00 GiB target budget (~46,000 MB)
  • BD-66 (Dual Layer UHD): 61.50 GiB target budget (~61,500 MB)
  • BD-100 (Triple Layer BDXL): 92.00 GiB target budget (~92,000 MB)
  • BD-128 (Quad Layer BDXL): 118.00 GiB target budget (~118,000 MB)
• 📀 Standard-Compliant Authoring:
  • DVD-Video: MPEG-2 video (NTSC 720×480 @ 29.97fps / PAL 720×576 @ 25fps), 48kHz AC3 audio, dvdauthor VTS titlesets, 16:9 widescreen anamorphic / 4:3 aspect ratios, and selectable subtitle tracks.
  • Blu-ray (BDMV): H.264/AVC High Profile Level 4.1, tsMuxeR BDMV/CERTIFICATE structures, and UDF 2.50 formatting.
• 💬 Subtitle Preservation: Automatically converts PGS and SRT subtitle streams into compliant DVD subpictures (dvdsub), selectable using standard remote control subtitle toggles.
• ⏭️ Full-Movie Chapters: Preserves embedded chapter markers from source files, or automatically creates 5-minute interval chapters across the entire movie duration.
• ⚡ Hardware Acceleration: Full NVIDIA NVDEC hardware decode for all common formats, NVIDIA NVENC hardware encoding for Blu-ray streams, and multi-core CPU matrix-optimized transcoding with automatic fallback.
• ⏸️ Pause / Resume Queue Controls: Suspend in-progress transcoding or burning jobs on the fly. When a running job completes, DVDCompress automatically picks up and resumes the next queued job.
• 🔥 Direct Optical Disc Burning: Real-time SCSI/SATA/USB optical drive detection (/dev/sr*, /dev/sg*), disc media status inspection, and rock-solid burning with buffer underrun protection via growisofs and cdrskin/xorriso.
• 🌐 Modern Real-Time Web Interface: Live WebSocket pipeline monitoring, interactive media directory navigation, real-time transcoding FPS/speed/ETA telemetry, live CPU, RAM, and GPU/VRAM gauges, and integrated log terminal stream.
• 💿 Standalone ISO Burner: Quickly burn existing ISO files directly to disc with customizable burn speeds.

🏗 Architecture

+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                              Docker Container                           |
|                                                                         |
|  +-----------------------+     +-------------------------------------+  |
|  |     Modern Web UI     | <-> | FastAPI Application Server (Python) |  |
|  |  (HTML5/CSS/Vanilla)  |     |  - REST API & WebSocket Handler     |  |
|  |  - Telemetry Chips    |     |  - Async Job Pipeline & Queue       |  |
|  +-----------------------+     +-------------------------------------+  |
|                                                   |                     |
|           +---------------------------------------+                     |
|           |                   |                   |                     |
|           v                   v                   v                     |
|  +----------------+  +-----------------+  +-----------------+           |
|  | Transcoding    |  | Disc Authoring  |  | Disc Burning    |           |
|  |  - FFmpeg      |  |  - dvdauthor    |  |  - growisofs    |           |
|  |  - NVDEC/CUDA  |  |  - spumux       |  |  - cdrskin      |           |
|  |  - NVENC / CPU |  |  - tsMuxeR      |  |  - xorriso      |           |
|  |  - ffprobe     |  |  - genisoimage  |  |  - lsscsi       |           |
|  +----------------+  +-----------------+  +-----------------+           |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
       |                                   |                    |
       v (Volume Mounts)                   v (GPU Passthrough)  v (Device Pass)
   /media  (Source Videos)              --gpus all          /dev/sr0, /dev/sg0
   /output (Authored ISOs)             (NVIDIA Runtime)      (Optical Writer)
   /config (App Settings)
   /tmp/dvdcompress (Scratch)

🚀 Quick Start

1. Docker Compose (Recommended)

Create a docker-compose.yml file:

version: '3.8'

services:
  dvdcompress:
    image: hovee/dvdcompress:latest
    container_name: dvdcompress
    restart: unless-stopped
    privileged: true
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    environment:
      - TZ=America/New_York
      - DVDCOMPRESS_LOG_LEVEL=INFO
      - NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=all
      - NVIDIA_DRIVER_CAPABILITIES=all,video,compute,utility
    volumes:
      - /path/to/your/media:/media:ro
      - /path/to/your/output:/output:rw
      - /path/to/your/config:/config:rw
      - /path/to/your/temp:/tmp/dvdcompress:rw
    devices:
      - /dev/sr0:/dev/sr0
      - /dev/sg0:/dev/sg0
    deploy:
      resources:
        reservations:
          devices:
            - driver: nvidia
              count: all
              capabilities: [gpu, video, compute, utility]

Launch the container:

docker compose up -d

Open your browser and navigate to: http://<your-server-ip>:8080

2. Docker CLI

GPU-Accelerated Mode (NVIDIA)

docker run -d \
  --name dvdcompress \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  --privileged \
  --gpus all \
  --device /dev/sr0:/dev/sr0 \
  --device /dev/sg0:/dev/sg0 \
  -p 8080:8080 \
  -v /mnt/media:/media:ro \
  -v /mnt/dvd_output:/output:rw \
  -v /mnt/appdata/dvdcompress:/config:rw \
  -v /tmp/dvdcompress:/tmp/dvdcompress:rw \
  -e TZ=UTC \
  hovee/dvdcompress:latest

CPU-Only Mode

docker run -d \
  --name dvdcompress \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  --privileged \
  --device /dev/sr0:/dev/sr0 \
  --device /dev/sg0:/dev/sg0 \
  -p 8080:8080 \
  -v /mnt/media:/media:ro \
  -v /mnt/dvd_output:/output:rw \
  -v /mnt/appdata/dvdcompress:/config:rw \
  -v /tmp/dvdcompress:/tmp/dvdcompress:rw \
  -e TZ=UTC \
  hovee/dvdcompress:latest

🖥 Deployment Guides

Unraid OS

1. Install the NVIDIA Driver plugin from Community Applications (if using an NVIDIA GPU).
2. Add a new Docker Container in Unraid (or use the included templates/DVDCompress.xml):
   • Repository: hovee/dvdcompress:latest
   • WebUI: http://[IP]:[PORT:8080]
   • Port: 8080 $\rightarrow$ 8080
   • Path 1 (Media): /mnt/user/Media $\rightarrow$ /media (Read-only)
   • Path 2 (Output): /mnt/user/Media/dvd_output $\rightarrow$ /output (Read/Write)
   • Path 3 (Config): /mnt/user/appdata/dvdcompress $\rightarrow$ /config
   • Path 4 (Scratch Temp): /mnt/user/appdata/dvdcompress/working $\rightarrow$ /tmp/dvdcompress
   • Device 1: /dev/sr0 $\rightarrow$ /dev/sr0
   • Device 2: /dev/sg0 $\rightarrow$ /dev/sg0
   • Privileged: ON
   • Extra Parameters: --gpus all --runtime=nvidia
   • Variables: NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES = all, NVIDIA_DRIVER_CAPABILITIES = all,video,compute,utility

TrueNAS SCALE

1. Go to Apps $\rightarrow$ Launch Docker Image (or Custom App).
2. Configure Image: hovee/dvdcompress:latest.
3. Set Port Forwarding: Host Port 8080 to Container Port 8080.
4. Configure Host Path Storage Volumes for /media, /output, /config, and /tmp/dvdcompress.
5. Under GPU Resource Allocation, allocate 1 NVIDIA GPU.
6. Under Device Passthrough, add /dev/sr0 and /dev/sg0 with Privileged access enabled.

⚡ Hardware Acceleration

DVDCompress utilizes NVIDIA CUDA and NVDEC/NVENC to accelerate media transcoding:

💿 Optical Drive Pass-Through

To enable physical disc burning from inside Docker, pass both the optical block device (/dev/sr*) and the SCSI generic device (/dev/sg*):

1. Identify connected optical drives on the host:

   lsscsi -k
   # Example output: [2:0:0:0] cd/dvd ASUS BW-16D1HT /dev/sr0 /dev/sg0
   

2. Verify host permissions:

   ls -l /dev/sr0 /dev/sg0
   

3. Pass devices to container:

   devices:
     - /dev/sr0:/dev/sr0
     - /dev/sg0:/dev/sg0
   

📊 Technical Specifications & Capacities

📡 REST API & WebSocket Reference

DVDCompress provides a full REST and WebSocket API:

• GET /api/health — Application health check
• GET /api/files?path=/media/... — File browser listing playable video files and ISOs
• POST /api/probe — FFprobe media analysis (duration, codec, resolution, audio streams, chapters, subtitles)
• POST /api/calculate — Bitrate budget calculation based on input durations and disc target
• GET /api/drives — Scan host system for optical drives and query disc media presence
• GET /api/system — Live system telemetry (CPU %, RAM used/total, GPU %, VRAM, temp)
• POST /api/jobs — Create and start a transcoding/authoring/burning job
• POST /api/burn-iso — Directly burn an existing ISO file to an optical drive
• GET /api/jobs — Retrieve active and historical jobs
• GET /api/jobs/{job_id} — Get single job progress and telemetry
• POST /api/jobs/{job_id}/pause — Pause an in-progress job
• POST /api/jobs/{job_id}/resume — Resume a paused job
• POST /api/jobs/{job_id}/cancel — Cancel an in-progress job and terminate child processes
• WS /ws/jobs/{job_id} — Real-time bidirectional WebSocket stream for progress updates and live logs

🛠 Local Development & Testing

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/hoveeman/DVDCompress.git
cd DVDCompress

# Create virtual environment and install dependencies
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"

# Run full test suite
pytest tests/ -v

# Run local development server
uvicorn dvdcompress.api:app --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8080 --reload

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.